How to Make Your Own Choreographies

Difficulty: Intermediate/Advanced. Workload: High. Suggested duration: 7 weeks. If you follow our suggested duration of seven weeks, get ready to invest about 2-4 hours per week in your training, but you can always go through this intensive at your own pace. Creating your own choreography can feel incredibly exciting… and also surprisingly overwhelming. Where do you even start? How do you choose the right music? How do you move from one idea to the next without everything feeling random? And once you have a draft, how do you make it more interesting, musical, balanced, and truly yours? This 7-week intensive is designed to guide you through the entire creative process from the very first idea to a complete choreography structure. The goal is not to give you one formula that everyone has to follow, but to introduce you to many different tools, approaches, and questions that can help you discover your own way of choreographing. We’ll begin with finding your starting point through tools like improvisation, musical listening, analyzing emotional energy, and mapping out ideas. Then we’ll move into creating the opening, building transitions, using space and traveling intentionally, interpreting lyrics and instruments when necessary, breaking symmetry and predictable patterns, and playing with speed, rhythm, pauses, poses, and changes in energy. In the final weeks, we’ll look at how to enrich simple material, refine arms and body use, and strengthen your presence so the choreography feels more developed and more personal. Throughout the intensive, you’ll work with lectures, technique drills, demonstrations, and practical exercises designed to help you not just create one choreography, but build a set of tools you can return to again and again in future creative work. The seven-week structure is not meant to suggest that every choreography should take exactly seven weeks to create; it simply gives us enough space to explore the many layers of the process in detail.